But to understand Joya's contradictory views, we need to look at how her career began and developed. Let's go back to the constitutional Loya Jerga of 2003 when Joya first became famous. At the time, she was an independent voice and had the audacity to make a relevant, but politically explosive comment. She said that the inclusion of war criminals threatened to undermine the assembly's legitimacy with Afghans risking to miss out of a historical chance for justice. Morally, she was absolutely right; but the truth was that, after two decades of violence, it was inevitable that the leaders that had emerged owed their power to war.

The international community had to work with what was there – and what was there was war leaders with dubious human rights records. To exclude them from the assembly was unreasonable because it would have driven them to start a new war front. Including them in the assembly meant that the Taliban remained the sole insurgents while the former mujahedin stopped fighting and began a new government. It was a morally flawed but pragmatic solution. Joya was driven by a burning desire for justice – pragmatism has never been her strength.

Joya's outspoken comment took the assembly by surprise. It was up to the assembly leader, Sebghatullah Mojaddedi, to diffuse the situation because he was older and more experienced. But Mojaddedi took offence and ordered Joya to leave the assembly. He then changed his mind and struck a gentler note, "Come back, child, you owe us an apology." But it was too late: the old man had lost the young woman. And with that, Joya lost a chance to fully develop her potential and work on the kind of constructive and reconciliatory politics that Afghanistan needed.

Since then, Joya's career as MP has been marked by repeats of that crucial early scene of her, a young woman, confronting old jihadi men. The location shifted from the Loya Jerga tent to parliament, but Joya and her jihadi nemesis remained stuck in an endless cycle of accusation and counter-accusation. The Afghan audiences found the confrontations first interesting, then amusing and finally lost interest in them altogether. By then, Joya was ousted from parliament, but her career abroad was beginning to flourish. Her book tour of the US is part of this development.

The tragedy of Joya is that she was spotted by the international media and a clandestine radical leftist Afghan organisation at a time when Afghan democracy was in its infancy. At the time, Afghan human rights groups had not yet developed fully to give Joya the kind of support she needed. Isolated and vulnerable, she became an easy prey and was picked up by a group whose politics were steeped in the anti-imperialist revolutionary world of the 1960s and 70s ideological battles. Joya has served as a respectable front for a group that otherwise has little backing in Afghanistan. Joya's recurrent reference to "warlords in the pay of the US" are all about the group's bitterness that Washington allied itself with the group's Islamists rivals in the 1980s, enabling them to defeat the left. The alliance was abandoned between 1992 and 2001, but resumed fully with the 2001 intervention. Little wonder, then, that the group felt doubly betrayed by Washington.

This also explained the intensity of the jihadis' reaction to Joya. After all, criticising warlords was nothing unusual by 2007. But Joya was re-opening old wounds. Her repeated reference to the internal wars of the 1990s was the group's message that the jihadi victory was not complete since they had failed to cement it through establishing a solid state.

Needless to say, such nuances have been lost on the western media who presented Joya's provocations as a woman's struggle for rights and democracy. The thought that her disruption of parliament was evidence of an anti-democratic attitude on her part did not occur to them. After all, in the simplistic world of western politics, a young woman fighting bearded old men simply cannot be wrong.